(NB – This is the anniversary of our very first date, last year in Hastings! On Friday, July 22, 2011, Mark drove from Lincoln to Hastings in 95 degree weather to go for a very warm walk and a (much cooler!) visit to the Hastings Museum with me, although he only knew me from a brief e-mail exchange and one phone call. 🙂 ) Hard to fathom that it’s already been a year–or, maybe, hard to fathom that we haven’t known each other for decades already!
We left early this morning after a brief hotel breakfast to drive the long stretch across the Nevada desert (starting with a little bit of Utah) and into California, stopping just before getting into Yosemite. The drive was mostly rather boring–straight roads for the most part, with very little traffic, and a lot of sage-brush-covered desert. We drove along a highway that crosses through the famed “Area 51” where people claim to see UFOs and been abducted by aliens, so much so that Nevada thought it could make it a tourist attraction by calling it “Extraterrestrial highway.” But only about 200 vehicles a day use it to get to Highway 6, which leads into California, and I am not sure we encountered more than 5 of those. It took forever to get from Cedar City too the next gas station and fast-food stop, but we finally found one a little after noon, and took our one and only break then. We continued to California via Benton Springs (a completely dead town by the looks of it) and found a very nice hotel in Lee Vening, 12 miles outside the Tioga Pass entrance to Yosemite. It was only 3 pm when we arrived, so we walked around a little bit, rested up and had a very pleasant BBQ dinner early in the evening, so we could still go down to Mono Lake, this town’s only attraction apart from its vicinity to Yosemite. The lake is a terminal lake (a new term for me: it does not have any outlets, so the only way it loses water is through evaporation, and like many such lakes, it has a very high salt content). Because of the mineral content combined with the geology of the area, and the fact that the lake receded to half its size from the 1950s to the 1980s, when Los Angeles siphoned off much of the streams that ran into the lake, Lake Mono has these cool-looking formations called Tufa that look a little bit like a mix between coral and stalagmites. They pile up in odd castle-like structures all along the banks of the lake. There were also a lot of birds, especially really small waterfowl that flew in huge groups over the water, so the flocks looked like enormous flying carpets. The lake is surrounded by different types of mountains, from almost white-looking sandstone piles to volcanic rock and the snow-dotted mountains in the Park, and the scenery was really dramatic when we took our walk–between the different types of rocks, dramatic cloud pile-ups, the occasional lightning bolt, smoke from a small lightning-caused fire in the mountains, AND a rainbow, we couldn’t have looked for better photo ops! We stayed for about an hour, and then went back to our hotel room to rest up for what we hope will be a wonderful driving + hiking day in Yosemite.